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Unsuspecting

Sun­day, Jan­u­ary 27, 2019: I’m still decid­ing whether it was the best or the worst day of my life. Maybe it was both. In any case, at the end of the day there was a new small human on the plan­et, and we were par­ents to a beau­ti­ful son. (On this web­site he remains anony­mous to pre­vent these ram­blings from his moth­er show­ing up in Google in future).

How­ev­er good or bad the day was, in ret­ro­spect it was also my last day of free­dom.

Poop­ing or vac­u­um clean­ing

If I ever thought about life with a baby, I thought it would be basi­cal­ly the same as dur­ing my preg­nan­cy. I always had Y. with me, and I deter­mined whether we went cycling, exer­cis­ing, vac­u­um­ing, or if we quick­ly popped into the super­mar­ket after a day’s work. My imag­i­na­tion did not go much fur­ther than exchang­ing my bike for a push chair on the bus. O bliss­ful naivety … Now that Y. has made its entrance into the world, we are still always togeth­er, but the roles have been thor­ough­ly reversed. He deter­mines where the pri­or­i­ties lie, and after drink­ing, poop­ing and curi­ous­ly look­ing around (which is appar­ent­ly only pos­si­ble on the arm of an adult), ‘sleep for my par­ents’ dan­gles at the bot­tom of that list. Did I ever say any­thing about babies being enlight­ened, self­less souls?

Pur­pose of what life?

Of course, the lit­tle dic­ta­tor is more than enti­tled to our time and atten­tion, our hugs, kiss­es and breast milk. And the advan­tage is that I can throw my own to do lists away and I don’t have to wor­ry about the pur­pose of my life for a cou­ple of years. If things occa­sion­al­ly get on top of me dur­ing a sleep­less night or if I look around in despair at piles of wash­ing up, the dirty lit­ter box, and a thou­sand oth­er chores that I would oth­er­wise ‘just’ do, I know we are a team and can do any­thing togeth­er: Fred­dy (nap­pies, com­fort­ing, cook­ing, clean­ing, etc. etc.) Y. (smiles, naps, gen­er­al cute­ness) and me (feed­ing, eat­ing, writ­ing blogs?). All the cards, vis­its and presents that we received pro­vide a cel­e­bra­to­ry back­drop that is also good for our morale.

Week­ly bread

For me, the step from preg­nan­cy to baby was only real­ly made when Y. and I were in church last Sun­day. A few weeks ago I had to reach over my huge bel­ly to receive com­mu­nion, and now Y. was greet­ed by all those love­ly peo­ple who have been wait­ing for him for so long. Of course he slept through every­thing, because the litur­gy was just as famil­iar to him as it was to me. The words that always vibrat­ed in my bel­ly now sound­ed all around him: “Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread”.

I start­ed out on this adven­ture with­out a clue of what it was going to be like. But I’m not doing it alone.